Notes Towards an Essay about the Writing Scenery in Portland.

I’m not from here either. From Reno, Nevada I first moved to Portland, Oregon in December 2005, lived here until August 2008, then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I lived until December 2012. Then back to PDX in January 2013 and ever since. I’m not from here. (Say it proud, with a badge in your mouth.)

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Google the phrase “don’t move” and the fifth entry that pops up—after “don’t move game,” “don’t move,” “don’t move phantogram” and “don’t move lyrics”—is “don’t move to portland.” There are approximately 88,700,000 results for said “don’t move to portland” Google search, with the first being a (defunct) Tumblr entitled “Things I won’t miss about Portland.” Conversely, the last entry (at least as of this writing) is an article from the local PDX alternative weekly paper Willamette Week, one written in February of this year and entitled “26 Reasons To Love Portland Right Now.” Can a Google search be passive aggressive? Because if so this “don’t move to Portland” search seems to be; like its searcher, it doesn’t know exactly what it wants—or why exactly it wants it.

In a somewhat similar vein, there exists in the vasty halls of YouTube a web series called “Don’t Move Here;” the last episode of it was uploaded on July 26, 2010. A product of WKEntertainment (WK standing for Wieden + Kennedy, a bigwig international ad agency that has a branch office in Portland), “Don’t Move Here” is, per the series’ YouTube description, “a series that focuses exclusively on the burgeoning underground music scene in Portland. Using a combination of interviews and live footage we will expose the world to all the cool bands, record labels, and underground venues that make Portlands (sic) music scene so unique.” “Don’t Move Here’s…” title, then, is ironic; by exposing the world/internet to Portland’s coolness, you should move to Portland. Although the series is primarily music-focused, it also delves into some of Portland’s cooler neighborhoods; Sam Adams, Portland’s mayor at the time the series aired, is interviewed, etc., etc. Music is the focus, surely, but it’s the arts in general that are being promoted. As Kendra Lynn of Jackpot Studios says at the beginning of Episode 3, “The scene is that everyone is just, like, artists here and they’re, like, making music or doing whatever type of art, you know. The scene is just that people are creating.”

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We’re talking about Portland, Oregon, here, not Portland, Maine. (Although mad respect to PDX, ME, home of the Portland Seadogs, the best minor league baseball team in the history of the universe). And chalk it up to whatever you want—food carts or fixed gear bicycles or fancy coffee or the social acceptance of scruffy beards on upper-middle-class-middle-aged-men—PDX, OR is a city that is perpetually in the news these days. And it’s not just the Portlandia phenomenon, which aired its first episode in January of 2011. That was almost four years ago at this point…the idealistic tropes featured on that show might remain in people’s heads, but there’s something else happening to make Portland Portland, to make it a perpetual national talking point.

Like I said above, such mainstream press exposure isn’t out of the ordinary—it’s almost always like this. So the fact that it continues to occur isn’t particularly notable. What I’m interested in, then, is Portland’s self-absorption with itself in terms of all that. For writers and artists of all stripes this city is a great place for “creating,” certainly—but I would argue that it’s sometimes a less than great place in terms of the critique and critiquing of all that “creating.”

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What I mean by that is this: Portland is a hotbed for creation, yes. But at the same time it’s also a place that tenuously exists on supposed notions of exclusivity and insularity. (Don’t move here; we don’t need you. There are no jobs and it rains all the time. (Check out how cool Portland is! Everyone’s an artist here and there’s room for you! Come one, come all!))

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I’m a writer, mostly a poet. As such, all of the below is mainly focused on writing and writers, specifically those between the ages of 21 to, say, 45. Further disclaimer: I’m fully complicit in most everything I’m talking about. I’m not above any of it. To claim otherwise would, to a certain degree, be disingenuous. I’m not the worst, nor am I the best.

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The self-centeredness doesn’t bother me as much anymore; most writers and artists think their worlds are the center of the worlds, and that’s true if you live in Poland, Portugal or Portland. The fact that at least some of the small press publishers here (not all, but some) don’t actually read a lot of contemporary writing—instead mostly publishing their friends, their friends’ friends and via general solicitation—is something that I’m fine with also. As Blake Butler wrote in the distant past of 2011, “It helps to know someone at the journal and there’s nothing wrong with that. Many of the places I got accepted I had emailed with someone there or even met them. Their taking your work doesn’t mean you are a circle jerker, or that your work isn’t good enough for elsewhere. This means simply that you are involved and give a shit enough to be involved, and people recognize that. You meet people at journals for a reason…Really all that is happening is you are an active entity in something and if that gives you a slight leg up amidst the brutal onslaught of people sending work, well, you did extra. You got saw. Good for you. At the end of the day no one is publishing work they think is crappy whether it is by a friend or not.”

As Blake Butler also wrote in 2011, “No one on Facebook cares.” I’d further add that no one owes anyone anything in terms of this stuff. As far as I can tell, real money isn’t really being made. So if you feel screwed over in some way, if you feel underrepresented and rejected for no reason, start your own press. Solicit and publish whoever you want. Make the magazines look as nice as possible or not. Make the books look as nice as possible or not. Social media the shit out of them, etc. It’s been said a myriad of times before, but the ball’s truly in your court and no can or should tell you different. This is true if you live in New York or New Mexico or New Brunswick. Or Portland.

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So does that mean the “best” work gets published? No. But, as Marcel Duchamp once asserted, “[t]aste is an experience that I try not to let come into my life.” And there’s really no such thing as “best” in terms of writing. It’s hard reading dozens and dozens and dozens of submissions, especially when it’s just you, your boyfriend/girlfriend and three closest lit friends doing it. Way easier to just say fudge it and solicit well-known writers, to publish the work of your buddies. This is true in the “real” world also—if you know the general manager at the Burger King you’re dying to get hired at, you have a way better chance of getting the job. Even if you’ve never flipped a burger, even if you never fried a fry.

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What does irk me about PDX’s literary scene? Nothing, in all honesty. Maybe the fact that there’s too much going on all the time, thereby revving up my little inner FOMO. Maybe how there seems to be a disproportionate amount of attractive, intelligent people here—people who seemingly have no reason to be insecure—who are actively insecure. Or maybe that’s my own insecurity talking. Game recognize game. Ball don’t lie.

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What used to irk me about PDX’s literary scene? That’s a longer answer. It used to be the “we-are-all-one-big-happy-family” community assumptions that so many people outside of the city seem to think Portland contains. (Clique? Have you heard the word clique? It’s French for Portland.) It used to be the fact that for all the writers living and “creating” here there rarely seem to be (as far as I can tell, which perhaps isn’t saying much) any craft-based discussions among them, any regular swapping of poems or manuscripts or stories. Sure, there are writing groups and “what are you reading right now?” inquiries and oodles and oodles of reading series’ and readings. But no real legit writing communities, ones that on a regular basis get together and constructively critique the shit out of each other’s work. For a place that regularly makes those “best cities in America” or “the world for writers” lists, one where an independent bookstore spans an entire city block in the heart of downtown, Portland can sometimes feel strangely shallow on the writing and literature tip. Anyone who writes or wants to write is a nerd but there are still some nerds cooler than others, ones that (subtly and not so subtly) dictate societal gestures and habits and tastes. Cool nerds. But I’m rambling. What I’m trying to say is that Pound isn’t editing Eliot’s The Wasteland at Beulahland right now in Portland. Gordon Lish probs isn’t slashing through Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” at Dig A Pony or Heart. I might be wrong. I hope.

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That’s what used to irk me. But then I realized: Portland isn’t school and school is where I’ve spent most of my life. Who wants to talk about line breaks or narrative arc at a bar? There are young, attractive people at this bar, some of whom are probably single. Let’s talk about them. Let’s talk to them. Bright lights, (somewhat) big city.

This isn’t new either, this community-lack-of-communication. As taken from now-largely-unread-and-very-famous-in-his-time Archibald MacLeish’s Paris Review interview, conducted in 1974:

INTERVIEWER

In that twenties community, how much exchange of ideas went on . . . reading of each other’s manuscripts, advice sought and given . . . ?

MACLEISH

None. None so far as I was concerned. I met Hemingway a year or so after we got to Paris and Gerald Murphy about the same time . . . Dos, Estlin Cummings, Bishop, Scott . . . but there was no “community” in the sense in which you, I think, are using the word. No Americans-in-Paris community. That notion is a myth concocted after the event by critics with fish to fry. There was the literary-tourist world of the Dôme and the Rotonde but no work came out of that… In a touching letter toward the end of his life, Scott speaks of “the last American season” in Paris. If there ever was an “American season” in Paris in the twenties, Paris was not aware of it. Nor, I think, was anyone else.

Certainly I’m not comparing Portland in 2014 with Paris in 1927. What I’m comparing—not comparing but nudging towards and at—is that “community” is a word that has little to no purchase and hasn’t for a while. You might find “community” on a 4Chan chat board, sure. But it’s harder to find it in the real world, especially when there are a bunch of writers around, all of whom are trying to put together the best words in the best orders in the best ways, then get said words in said orders and ways published. Competition in the arts is bullshit. “Best” means” “taste” most of the time and taste is wholly subjective. Competition in the arts also exists, and writers measure themselves accordingly. Over the years there have been numerous exceptions, for sure. But everyone knows The New Yorker publishes run of the mill poems, ones rarely memorable. Everyone also wants to publish poetry in The New Yorker. It has actual readers. It’s exclusive; competition is extremely fierce.

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Easy to identify, harder to change. What have I done to change the PDX writing community and communities I’m a part of? What have I done to foment more critical, craft-based literary discussions among my fellow PDX writers? Nothing. I’ve done nothing. What will I do? I honestly don’t know. I like talking about artistic technique, about style, structure; doing so with writers of both similar and dissimilar minds from my own has drastically affected the way I receive, consider and understand different types of writing. I’ve always thought that you learn to write by reading, but, having read, talking openly and earnestly with others about that reading has profoundly shaped my craft as a writer. I miss those talks and discussions. But, like I said above, Portland isn’t school. It’s a city. One I’m an adult in, an adult working five days a week, teaching two days a week. Do I even have time for what I want? Does anyone? I don’t know. Which doesn’t mean I don’t want it. Which, sadly, doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.

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Something might be said for this notion also—perhaps so many artists flock to Portland precisely because of the lack of critique. There’s a freedom here, certainly. If you work part-time as a bar back and spend the rest of your waking hours drawing publishable comics or writing unpublishable villanelles, playing in bands destined to be associated with the word “local” or performing in a nationally touring improv troupe, there’s not a lot of judgment from the greater PDX artistic community. People won’t frown on you. They might not grin at you either, but they probably won’t frown at you. Social tolerance and acceptance is easy to find in Portland. In various ways, good and bad, that might be important.

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The impetus for this essay/think piece/whatever you want to call it: someone I used to teach in the Midwest sent me an electronic mail message asking me for advice: should she A) try and go to MFA school, or B) just move somewhere with a “vibrant literary scene” and attempt to “soak it in” as much as possible? In this case that somewhere she was thinking about was Portland. My first impulse was to say: school sucks, move here. My second impulse: there are too many “creators” here already; don’t move here, it’ll be hard to find a job, it rains too much. And my third, which is essentially what I wrote back to her: I’m probably the wrong person to ask for advice. Portland is a great city for a writer to live in, but every city is a great city for a writer to live in; you just have to work on what, day after day, you are attempting to do to the best of your abilities. In a coffee shop crammed with good looking people or alone in your shitty studio apartment, you have to write. And write. So come visit Portland—but whatever your impressions of it are, what you “create” is going to come down to not the city you live in but the extent of your own personal effort and investment in that effort.

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I’m not from here. I just live here. I love it, it’s great, there are things I don’t care for sometimes. I’m not leaving anytime soon.